This is the worst class. Your grade completely depends on the flexibility of your TA...Ortner is unengaging, monotone, and robotic in her instruction. She does not podcast her lectures, and her "slides" include a couple of maps and a broad, overarching topic. There are three extremely dense books required, and you have to post weekly summaries the Sunday before your next discussion. I would highly recommend avoiding this class.

I'm going to share the facts in a list format:
1) She could have been Jerry Seinfeld's mom
2) She will assign three books for you to read, and your first thoughts are "this can't be that bad". The three books assigned were:
Jocelyn Linnekin, Sacred Queens and Women of Consequence: Rank, Gender, and Colonialism in the Hawaiian Islands
Sherry B. Ortner, New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58.
Steven Gregory, The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic.
Take a brief 30 minutes to checkout previews of these books before registering for the course. They are dense and you will be tested on every little bit of information on them.
3)She will not cover any of the material from these three books in lecture. That is going to be left up to your TA to cover with you, in the limited amount of time allotted for discussion sessions. So it's pretty much left up to you to pick up on all of the testable information.
4)Ortner will use lecture instead to cover big picture topics such as neoliberalism, and the book by Gregory will be the ethnography for you to draw on for the topic, however she will NOT reference the book in any way, and that again will be the job of your TA to explain the connections.
5)So there are basically 5-6 professors for this class, depending on the team of TAs she uses your quarter, and each will have their own understanding of the connections made. If you and I have different TAs we will have a different understanding of the material for this class, and will receive different grades on the exams for the same amount of time spent studying. And that happened. According to a source, 34 students had their first exams regraded because of disputes with their TA about a lack of transparency on exam material. They were told to study one thing, and then were graded by the same TA on an entirely different rubric. When asked about the disparity in grading during lecture, Ortner said she has nothing to do with the grading, and to consult with the TAs about it. At the end, the regrades included test scores that went from C- to A, and others who thought they were unfairly graded but didn't receive a regrade. Imagine taking an exam you have studied really hard for, walking out of it expecting an A, and then getting slapped in the face with a C-. This didn't happen to me, since I was one of the lucky ones with who had a TA that was transparent and consistent about the information that would be testable, even though the TA was an extremely tough grader.

Those are the facts, and now here is my opinion:
This is the worst anthropology class and CLASS you will register for in your entire lifetime. You see "social systems" and you assume it should be easy. Do not let the name fool you. This class has no consideration of the fact that you have other classes to read and study for. The exams are all in class essays that you will not have enough time to completely write. You will be provided a study guide, that once you have completed will be about 6 pages of single spaced information. You will have to memorize those 6 pages, because that will be the only way to get the A you want, otherwise you will fail while attempting to be creative on the spot. There just isn't enough time for you to respond to the multiple essay prompts off the top of your head. If you miss one word, or sentence that the TA is looking for, you will be docked points for it.
Interestingly enough, since a study guide is provided, and it is your TA that will review the topics in the guides, it will be the information that your TA gives you that you end up studying, and not what you have from lecture notes. So basically you're being taught by someone else, who is also grading you, rendering Ortner's lectures a complete waste of life. Even scarier is the fact that if you end up using material from lecture to memorize, which your TA hasn't mentioned in the exam review, you might be docked points for it, if the TA was zoning out during lecture and didn't catch that point. I'm not sure if that was clear enough, but basically, you're being taught and graded by the TA.
Ortner will not provide you will her slides that include bold topic names only, and instead she will read from pages that she has typed her lecture in. Dense information presented in a very dry and robotic manner, with no enthusiasm. She looks like she hates being up there and is ready for retirement. Looking at her lecture ruins your day, and your entire perspective on what being a professor should be.
I am angry, not because I slacked off and didn't get the A I busted my ass for, but because of the inconsistencies in grading. A girl who had not previous record on file for having dyslexia got the same grade as me, only because she was smart enough to pull that card half way into the quarter after getting a shitty grade on the first exam. She bitched enough that the TA handed her the same grade I got, and this is simply unfair.
This is my official warning to you, this class is not on an undergraduate level, you will hate life, UCLA, and question your abilities as a student after taking this class. You will end up with a grade that you don't deserve regardless of what the grade is. "A" students getting B's and C's, while C- are being regarded and graded to A's and B's. A horror story. You will ruin your GPA kid...Don't do it to yourself. Even if you need a theory course and it's your last quarter before graduation, wait, and take something else when it becomes available. DON'T DO IT!

I loved this class. One of the few classes in the anthropology department that is actually relevant to the real world, and makes you think about why things are the way they are.

I liked Ortner a lot. She can be a tad monotonous during lecture, but its obvious she is trying to phrase things in a way that are understandable since she's super smart. She's pretty funny, and even though I never talked to her, she feels warm and approachable. I would totally recommend her. There's a lot of reading, but it's doable.

Only critique...Make sure you get a decent TA for lecture. I've heard not so nice things about one of the female TAs this quarter.

Ortner wasn't the worse professor ever, but she definitely wasn't the best.
First off let me say, the tests are no longer take home, they are in class.
Second it's pretty time consuming, you read 3 long books in 10 weeks, about 3/4 chapters per week.

But I will give her this: she was very concerned with the students ability to grasp the material. She would pause often during lecture to take questions, which was kind of annoying when it meant we weren't able to leave 15 minutes earlier, but she did try to relate most of the topics to contemporary times. And she was pretty funny.

Downside: She's not the best lecturer - instead of being clear and concise, she'll start her thought, then go off in a bit of a different direction, or her first sentence won't make sense so then she'd say it which I felt waste time. Or if she finally did say something that was clear, she'd continue on and on about that exact same thing. She really knew how to beat a dead horse.

I had professor Ortner Winter 2012 for anthro 150 and it was by far my favorite class AND my first A.

Her tests are take home with a work count, but if you are precise you should be fine. I admit I got screwed because of the word count, but I still got a B on the midterm. The questions are STRAIGHT from lecture and discussion, so it's very important to go. I only missed one class (a first for me) and what she covered then was the only thing I missed on the exam.

Her lectures are sometimes dry, but very cohesive; if she ever went over, it was worth it because there goes another test question! If you think otherwise you just don't understand how she's organized the class to better suit the thinkers she covers.

For this quarter she changed things up though, so instead of articles you read three full length ethnographies- including her own, which was VERY funny and an easy read.
Maybe this change is why the class was so much better compared to the person below me, but I had to comment (my first evaluation), because the class really was interesting and came in handy when I had to learn about Karl Marx this quarter!

Take Ortner; she's a pint-sized, sassy lady. (If you talk she will catch you!)

Ortner is a horrible professor. Her tests are take home and the questions aren't hard but she puts a max word count on each question and its not enough to be able to properly answer the question making it impossible to do very well on the exams. She is incredibly rude during class, calling out students for talking when they were not, and keeping you past time then calling students rude for leaving while shes still talking even though class is over. her lectures are horrible, she never finishes them. The topics she covers are in no way related to each other and they don't flow well. She touches on her subjects without properly explaining them. So you think you know the concepts but when you get the exams you realize that you don't know enough to be able to answer a question. She talks attendance in lecture and sections which is 20% of your grade. There were very few people that actually liked the class. I still don't know what I learned except that our generation is screwed. She uses the class to talk about herself and her work and how great she thinks she is. DO NOT TAKE THIS OR ANY CLASS WITH PROF ORTNER!!!